Yeah, that's impressive, but it's likely they used a tool to do it for them, and I know there are tools from looking around, and it would be more impressive if they actually placed the blocks themselves and gathered resources.

Yeah, that's impressive, but it's likely they used a tool to do it for them, and I know there are tools from looking around, and it would be more impressive if they actually placed the blocks themselves and gathered resources.

Notch has suggested on his twitter that they may do a minor release during the week containing just pistons because the rest of the adventure update is nowhere near finished. It sounds like a good idea to me, the game could do with a new injection of life right about now, but it will probably be a pain for server admins.

It's mostly a pain for me because I have to wait for CraftBukkit to be updated. But as long as they don't break a bunch of stuff it should be fine. That was really the problem with 1.6, it introduced so many bugs it left CraftBukkit a total wreck for days.

It's official, 1.7 is coming out this week as a piston-only update, with a few bugfixes attached. I'm a bit disappointed, I was hoping that the new lighting system, ravines and other non-adventure features they have been working on would be included too. Still, getting pistons now is better than waiting a month or more for the adventure update to be finished.

It has been 3 months since I uploaded my world and an awful lot has changed since then, so I've uploaded the current version of the world in case anyone is interested in seeing what I've built. You should start in the middle of my village, roads, tunnels and the Nether portal network link to all major landmarks, while the rail lines link to everywhere on my primary landmass.

Ah, it looks like what they are fixing is the "rolling sunset/sunrise" effect. Ever notice how if you aren't looking at distant chunks when the sun sets, as soon as you do look at them you see them lit up as if it's daytime, and then a moment later they go dark? And notice that they do this chunk-by-chunk, so it's quite noticeable and not at all seamless.

It sounds like they have found a way to deal with this so that the day/night lighting changes are no longer chunk updates. This would make them instantaneous, if I am understanding correctly. Cool!

I kind of liked that, it reminded me of the Discworld where light is slowed down by the magical field so that it's as slow as the speed of sound.

The new lighting system means that sunlight will be handled completely differently from torchlight and the other light-emitting blocks, which is presumably what is being done to fix that slow chunk update problem at sunrise and sunset. Also, moonlight will have a blue tint to it while torches will have a yellow tint to them.

It doesn't look likely to be included in 1.7, possibly because Notch has new plans for light when it comes to mob spawning and other adventure things now reserved for 1.8. But it does look like some other non-adventure things that Jeb was working on will be included, such as shears, stackable fences (yay!) and a few other things.